The Story Department

by Michael Coombs

Today was collection day for the Story Department. Iris spent all morning knocking on doors and exchanging niceties, and if she was lucky, leaving the customer with a product in hand. Today had not been a lucky day. Mr. Neyland was one of her last chances to make a good post-story pitch, so as he began to speak, she listened.

“When the lights started going out, I remember the shouting most. Not really screams, you know, maybe that’s what you picture, but—it was shouting, because I could understand it all.”

“What kinds of things were they shouting?” Iris asked.

“Stuff like, uh, ‘What’s going on? Oh no! Where are you?!’ People just calling out, you know, kinda panicking. Or. I dunno. I think some of them were just calling out to be heard. You know?”

“Mm.”

“Calling out so that no one would lose them in the darkness, even if they hadn’t known them from anywhere before. So I’ve held on to all those voices, and I’ve never forgotten them. I won’t let myself forget. I still remember the last voice I heard, before the overhead lights started clicking on and we started getting the monitors with the news. It was this old woman, with this real croaky voice, and she called out, ‘I’m ready for anything.’ Anything, she said. She was sure of herself.”

“Mmm.” Iris nodded, the arc of her head long and slow. “And then you heard the news?”

“Yeah. The accident.” Mr. Neyland shuffled in his seat and ran a hand over his half-bald scalp. “And that was the beginning of everything, you know? I couldn’t stay out anymore. I caught a ride back to Earth on this big plastic junker, and Raleigh just ended up being the destination. Sometimes I—I know this doesn’t matter, at the end of the day—but sometimes I wondered what would’ve happened if I landed someplace else. Someplace bigger, you know? Would I have thrived, gotten some cushy job, lived in some spritzy place, or would I have been lost in the gutter in a week? I never can . . .”

He paused. Iris blinked and wiggled her phone, serving as a recording device, in her hand.

“Does your . . . partner have to do that?” he asked. Iris looked over her shoulder and saw Chip scratching his back with his left foot, releasing intermittent grunts and ook-ooks.

“Chip! Knock it off!”

He stopped midscratch and looked up at her with a self-assured scowl. “It is a free country, as I understand it. Or did that change back when Musk hit term number four?”

Iris swallowed and put on her customer service voice. “Chip, please have some respect for our guest. I don’t think you’re showing much professional courtesy.”

“Courtesy shmourtesy. Why don’t you get onto the pitch already?” He resumed his scratching, moving from his back to the bony flesh below his ear. The hair that grew over it bristled and swirled as Chip scratched, eliciting muted clicks of satisfaction. Meanwhile, Mr. Neyland’s face grew indignant.

“Pitch? I thought you said you weren’t salespeople.” He shrunk back into his seat.

“Well, we’re not! Like I said, we represent the Story Department of Solon Superchargers.” Iris cleared her throat and recentered her posture, back straightened, chin certain. “Our purpose here is getting you to tell your story, which we’ll share on our platform to amplify your voice in these difficult times. And, of course, as proud Solon employees, we would love to share a few words at the end of our meeting today about our products. Did you know our superchargers have a fifty-percent advantage in battery life as well as an S-rank in build quality from independent organizations like—”

“Oh, God.” Mr. Neyland lurched to his feet and jammed his finger in the door’s direction. “Out! Out now! You people’s ads are bad enough!”

Iris froze as the tension between his request and the commission she would lose by following it waged war in her gut. “Sir, please! I’d love to hear how you made it here in Raleigh as a, uh . . . I’m sorry, what do you do again?”

“OUT!”

* * *

Iris released a groan as she stepped outside, Chip limping along beside her. She sunk to a squat next to the apartment complex’s door, steepling her hands in front of her face to think. The blood-orange sky above them was peppered with tiny personal ships and bloated passenger transports, along with a few sleek commercial rockets that glistened in the dying glow of the sun. The apartment complex they’d left cast a long easterly rectangle of shade, and the building’s barred windows smeared cross-shaped shadows on the road in front of them. Iris’s great-great-grandparents might have witnessed a time when these roads carried automobiles and buses and bikes, but in her era these objects were almost solely the territory of enthusiasts. For Iris, there was no time for those kinds of hobbies. Sunset came earlier and earlier these days, but no company had shortened their hours. It was only 4:30, and Iris and Chip had at least one more address to target before their shift was up.

“You brought in the chargers too early. Guy wasn’t even halfway done,” Chip said, hopping back and forth between his feet to balance on each one at a time. “Ruined the whole vibe.”

“I ruined the vibe?” Iris asked through clenched teeth. Chip glanced at her, picked his nose, wobbled on his left foot. The chimpanzee looked the part of a test subject in his tan jumpsuit and his stainless steel collar, which glittered with blocky attachments and blinking red dots. Of course, Iris donned the exact same getup, albeit her collar was lighter without the translation module and mood regulator he wore.

“You know what? Never mind.” Iris bowed her head between her knees. “What are we gonna say to the boss? Not a single sale today, our last three recordings didn’t even finish, and we probably can’t publish anything the lady from this morning said.”

“Yeah, something tells me our multimillion-dollar corporation isn’t going to publish some pinko calling for interstellar revolution.” Chip snorted. “Still, gotta hand it to her. She said what she had to say, and she meant it.”

Iris narrowed her eyes. “What, you agree with her?”

“Desperate times call for desperate measures and all that. What, you gonna report me to HQ?”

“I—no.”

That quieted Chip, but not in the sense that he had settled his point. He just regarded her with a condescending little smile that made her simmer.

“I don’t know what I agree with and what I don’t. I’m just saying she was a true believer. All the stuff she was saying, she really believed.” Chip looked up and away. Iris followed his gaze, tilting her head back so she could watch a pod-shaped ship putter along in the sky. “I appreciate that. I agree with having a real belief.”

Iris blinked. “Fair enough.”

Chip did a little hop off his right foot and landed on the pavement with both feet planted. “You’ve got the next stop pulled up?”

Iris slipped a hand into her breast pocket for her phone, letting her hand linger as she watched the pod ship sail behind a slanted iron obelisk of a transporter. She could just make out the lettering emblazoned on the side: Wake County Correctional Facilities.

“Yeah. Get the ship ready.”

* * *

When the Mideast Milky Way Space Station exploded nine years ago, all who weren’t killed or stranded or rocketed into parts unknown were forced back down to Earth. The basic principle of the nuclear reactor was atomic destruction applied to productive ends, and this was a principle many had become suspicious of. After the incident, there was a new push for softer forms of sustainable energy, and then there was a vigorous pushback in favor of the methods that had brought humanity such success in outer space. The vicious debate dragged on for weeks, then months, then years, and all the while, as the talking heads on the news streams jabbered over the issue, masses of people streamed down to Earth in jittery escape pods and ramshackle junkers.

The planet’s overpopulation woes had been eased, but after a generation of empty nesting, it could not support so many of its children returning home at once. Some starved in the overgrown streets, some hunted deformed species of mammals and roasted them in fire pits, and some worked in sales for upstart companies hoping to make a buck off the newly minted migrants. If Iris Newble could be fit into any category, it was the third.

Many looked at Iris as a class traitor or some kind of publican, exploiting everyday people’s need to own a decent electric motor. She didn’t get the big deal. It wasn’t like she sold the superchargers. The Story Department provided a humanitarian face to the company while also proselytizing the brilliance of Solon Superchargers to all the poor souls telling their #ReturnStories. She thought it was a win-win-win. Maybe a win-win-win-win if one included Chip, though he did not seem to enjoy his work flying her around to record all of these stories. She didn’t understand his issue. What would he be doing if not for this? Flying Uber?

“This joker sure lives out of the way,” Chip said, scanning the dusky horizon as they soared over a foot-tall field of flaking brown tobacco. Anthropocized apes had created a new market for smoking, and no one minded selling it to them. Who cared about their lungs? Chip sucked on his cigarette and blew a ring out the window.

“Variousness Whitt,” Iris said, reading from her screen. “No picture, no background. I hate going in cold.”

“You’ll survive. Want me to wait outside, ease his mind a little? My luck, the hick’ll try to eat me.”

“You don’t know he’s a hick,” Iris said, hesitating on the last word. Some argued that hick had morphed into a slur directed toward the victims of the explosion, especially the ones who settled in rural areas. It didn’t feel that way to her. It sounded that way coming out of Chip’s mouth, though.

“Looks like this is it.”

Chip pressed the ship’s handles outward and the aircraft began to circle down. Iris wasn’t much a fan of their ship, a rounded hatchback with mediocre data access and terrible wind noise. She wasn’t much a fan of the way Chip flew it, either, taking too many risks and yet never seeming to arrive anywhere on time. So, as was typical, they were a few minutes late to their appointment with Variousness Whitt, who evidently lived in a squat sheet-metal house lit by old burning-white LEDs. A couple broken-down ships laid in state in a packed-down dirt field behind the house. They were in an area that used to be called Benson but was now part of Unincorporated Central North Carolina.

Iris and Chip climbed out and approached slowly, Iris double- and triple-checking her coordinates and information. With no more reason for delay, she stepped toward the door and knocked three times. Her fist shot three bang bang bangs off the metal door and across the wooded valley. She cringed.

“Coming!” a heavy voice called out. Iris and Chip exchanged a glance. Chip took two steps back, stealing another smoke.

The door opened to reveal Variousness Whitt, a small and stocky white man with bushy salt-and-pepper hair growing out of his head in every direction. Images of old prelaunch pictures of Santa Claus came to Iris’s mind, but while Santa was always ruddy and grinning beneath his snowy beard, Variousness Whitt was impossibly pale. His eyebrows were low and heavy over his wide-lidded eyes, and his lips, barely visible beneath his mustache, were thin as two crossing wires.

“You’re those story folks, right?” Whitt asked, twiddling a strand of his beard hair. His voice had a warped quality, as if he was speaking from underwater or behind a fan. “Pleased to meet you. I’m Variousness Whitt the third. Would you like to enter my humble abode?”

He did not extend a hand, or make any welcoming gesture. Iris took some comfort in the pocket taser tucked inside her belt, smiled, and nodded. “Yes, please. Thank you for having us!”

He led them into a square den littered with plastic panels, cut wires, and barrels and boxes made from many materials. The only surfaces untouched by the junk were a faux-leather purple couch and an old card table that held an equally old computer, a grayish Toshiba flecked with dirt. Iris followed his twisting path through the electronic debris, suppressing a cringe.

They settled on the couch. Chip chose to stand nearby, putting out his cigarette on his leg and pocketing the butt.

“I’ll appreciate that,” Whitt said to that, nodding once. “Cigarette smoke could damage some of the equipment I have stored here.”

Chip stared at him for a second, mouth ajar, before nodding a small, tense nod. Iris was surprised he didn’t say “go pound sand,” or something worse.

“Now then, before we begin, I should let you know that I plan on recording our conversation to be transcribed later. Is that okay?” Iris asked, talking and moving on autopilot as she tapped her way into the recording app on her phone. She dug a tooth into her bottom lip as the program churned to life. The old Sunsoft brick she had been issued ran slow.

“That’ll be great. I would have asked for it if you didn’t,” Whitt said, arms crossed. “Make sure you keep it on file, too. Make copies. Store ‘em in different places.”

“Yes, sir, of course. That’s all standard procedure.” It was not standard procedure and Iris didn’t plan on making it so, but anything that could put her clients’ minds at ease was the right thing to say. She heard Chip scoff as he hopped up and sat on the armrest next to her.

“Now then, do you mind telling us a little about yourself? Your name, your occupation, how you grew up?” Iris settled into a faux-sweet disposition as she asked this. It was a part she’d grown used to, and maybe not grown to love, but certainly grown to inhabit.

“Certainly, ma’am. My name is Variousness Whitt the third, and I—well. I guess these days, you could say I just tinker.” He chuckled, hands stitched together and resting on his belly. “But back in my prime I was a nu-cle-ar engineer. You got that down? Nuclear. It’s been in my family for a few generations, back when my granddad was smart enough to get on the train right when the government contracts exploded. And I do mean exploded. Lots of failed tests back in them days. That’s why some of them old fields near the coast are the bad kind of wintry!”

He chuckled again, but this time it came out icy. Chip had begun smacking on banana-flavor nicotine gum, but at this moment, his chewing slowed. Iris met his eyes for a split second before returning her attention to the customer.

Without prompting, Whitt continued, “I guess exploding done been in the blood. You can go all the way back to ole Christian Whitt, working explosives for the transcontinental railroad in eighteen-hundred times. You hear that? We got American down deep in the blood. Not a lot of folks that can say that these days, huh?” He grinned and let out a lone, high guffaw. “Bleed red. Bleed white and blue, too. Them colors don’t run, ma’am.”

“Of course, sir.” Iris found patriotism one of the most hilarious artifacts of the landed age, especially since their president now made his residence on a space station in low orbit, but she kept her smile big and bright enough to make her jaw ache.

“So I worked nuclear for a long time, and I guess I must have been pretty good at it because I kept getting on up the food chain. And I had this wife, and these kids, and this complex for ourselves in Mideast Space Station, and I gotta tell you, it was some kind of life. You know what I mean, pal?” Whitt turned his attention to Chip, leaning forward and looking past Iris. “When you got all your creature comforts, and all your kin around you, that’s just contentment. You know?”

Chip’s chewing stopped again. If he had any sort of kin known to him, he’d never told Iris.

“Uh, yeah. Whatever,” he said. Iris began to wonder why Chip was so reserved around this guy when he consistently ruined about a third of their interviews with boneheaded comments.

“Content’s a good thing to be,” Whitt said, leaning back into the couch. He gazed up at the ceiling, eyes beady and shiny. “But content ain’t much. You’ll know that, too, when you get to be my age and you’ve had it around for a while. And I would sit up there in the big ole blackness of space, and just a few speckles to pass for stars around, and the walls were all made of this cold white plastic, and the kids were all making buddies with robots, and you just start to go CRAZY!”

Whitt lurched forward and stopped just a couple inches from Iris’s face. She could smell beets on his breath. “You know what I mean?”

Iris flinched. She sensed Chip on his heels below her.

“I, uh. Yes. Absolutely, sir.” Her phone shook in her palm. “Being in one place, yes, it’s, ah, it’ll make you crazy. But don’t you, uhhh, don’t you think that all the advantages we have to get around can, well, don’t you think they can help with that?”

Iris never bargained with customers in any way, partly due to company policy and partly due to taste. Some animal gland in her brain took over and forced her to ask for compromise, for retreat.

It worked. Whitt settled back and rested, nodding slow and short. He looked much less satisfied, though, and his lips were nearing the look of a scowl.

“Sure. Get a little ship. Get around some. Take the family on a trip.” He sniffled and scratched his beard. “But then a lot of things can happen on a trip. You know what I mean, pal?”

He looked at Chip again, but this time he didn’t move. His eyes somehow lasered past Iris and bored into the eyes of the chimp crouching on the floor, who had mashed gum molded to his back molars while he watched Whitt’s every twitch.

“You know what I mean?” Whitt repeated.

“I know what you mean,” Chip said.

“As long as we understand each other. As long as we understand things can just happen in the vacuum of space. A hatch malfunctions. Everything starts to suck in around you. Then pain. Pressure. Nothing but blackness. And you wake up, and you’re alone in a little ole room. No family around.”

Iris’s phone slipped in her hand, which had slickened with sweat. She resettled it.

“There’s a service. There’s 500 dollars in your account, from the insurance. And the company says, here, take three days off, come back to work. And out there in space, going back to your little apartment, staring into a vat of big black nothing outside your window. And the absolute silence of God.”

Iris cleared her throat. “Mr. Whitt, please excuse my interruption. It’s, ah, it’s awful what happened to your family. Do you mind if I help us recenter this conversation so we get on the same page? How about—"

“Oh no, lady, we’re on the same page. We’re in the same damn sentence. I’m just getting to my point.”

His whole body straightened in one motion, his elbows resting on his knees. Iris saw him grow much taller. She pushed her tongue against her teeth.

“I came back to Mideast. I felt all the eyes on me. I heard all the words. My work slipped, they said. Maybe he just wanted a comp payout, they said. They said a lot. And I knew my mission. When you have a mission, everything around you is just still. All the people are like clones. They do the same thing. They dart from place to place. They’re happy just living like fleas, skittering this way and that. Doing their tasks. Pleasing their masters. Floating along through the thick of the abyss. But the Whitt family don’t do that. The Whitt family don’t float. A floater is a drowner.” He reared up a bit and stared directly into Iris with all the fire that his puffy blue eyes could muster. “Let me repeat that so that you understand me. A floater is a drowner.”

“Yes. Okay.” Iris swallowed.

“I was sick of floating. And that’s why one day God spoke and commanded me to get it done. I was commanded to send us, all of us, back to Earth. I didn’t do it for me, not one lick of it. I did it for the very soul of humanity.” He relaxed, not much, but enough that his shoulders pressed against the couch once more. “I did it for us. I did it so we could finally return home.”

A silence ruled over Variousness Whitt’s little house after this. Iris had experienced nearly every type of awkward silence there was over the course of her career, but she couldn’t identify this silence. She searched through the muck of her gut and discovered terror, and relief, and the awful dawn of knowledge.

Chip broke the silence when he said, “All right, then. Thanks, pal. We’ll get that out there quick as we can. Thanks for sharing, thanks a lot, pal.”

He leapt to his feet and tugged on the fabric of Iris’s jumpsuit with businesslike haste. “You’ve been a blast, buddy. Tickled the cockles of this little monkey’s heart. Thanks, friend. Been great.”

“Sure,” Whitt said, wearing a sleepy smile as if he’d just regaled them with a charming folk tale. “Glad to chat, any time. Y’all come back now, you hear?”

“Oh sure, oh yeah, pal. Yeah.” Chip tugged harder at Iris’s leg. She felt a haze disperse from her as she stepped to her feet, smiled her faux-sweet smile at Mr. Whitt, and gave the littlest bow.

“You want me to buy one of them superchargers? They work great, you know. I got three of ‘em in the shed.”

“That won’t be necessary, sir!”

“All good, man. We’re good to go, pal. We’ll be seeing you, guy.”

They scurried outside to a darkened sky. They said nothing as they ran to the ship, Chip jumping in with one graceful hop while Iris scampered up and dragged herself into her seat, Chip punching in the launch sequence in record time while Iris clung to the door handle for balance, watching as the house door creaked back open and Variousness Whitt came to stand on the threshold. As they bounced backward and upward and outward into the sky, Whitt remained there, watching, silhouetted by the harsh sheen of his LED floodlights. Iris couldn’t say it for certain, but she swore she saw a hint of a smile on his face as he watched them soar into the night.

“Oh my God,” Iris gasped. “I thought—I don’t know what I think.”

“I thought I was gonna get my first tase under my belt,” Chip said, teeth mashing furiously into each other as he chewed his gum. Without spitting it out, he jammed his hand into his pocket to retrieve a cigarette, brushed it against the flintlock instant starter on his dash, and began to smoke. After a few seconds he grabbed another, and then he was huffing and puffing on two cigarettes and demolishing a wad of gum as he flew them on at a hundred miles an hour.

The further they traveled from Variousness Whitt, the closer Iris came to relaxation. She felt the goosebumps on her forearms pop, the sweat on the back of her neck begin to dry into mild salt stains.

She pulled out her phone. “I’ll just be deleting this, thank you very much,” she said, feeling a wave of contentment wash over her as she tapped her way into the company recordings menu.

“What?” Chip asked, flat and incredulous. Iris paused and met his eyes, which were scrunched up and asking several questions on their own.

“It’s like you said earlier, with the communist lady. It’s not like the company will want this out there. Would you buy a single accessory from us after reading that?”

“This is different.” Chip looked out the windshield again, whizzing by another ship to the right and then a pine tree to the left. “That was one person’s opinion. This is dangerous shit. We need to—I don’t know, we need to report this to somebody. Link up with the police. Or at least put it out there. People need to know.”

Iris didn’t know how to react. She never expected intelligence from Chip, but he had a crude and comprehensive common sense about him that functioned just as well. Now she questioned even that.

“Chip. He’s crazy. Okay? This is not the scoop of the century we’re sitting on. It’s some creepy old guy.”

“Maybe it is. He did come from the greatest railroad exploder ever or something.”

“This is not a time for jokes!”

Chip stared at her, eyes flat and even as smoke fumed from both sides of his mouth. She found herself breathing heavy. Everything about this engaged her senses, amplified her mind. She preferred her senses distant and her mind quiet.

“I am not losing my job for this. I am not going through HR hell for this. And I do not care about ‘the truth’ or whatever.” She paused, swallowed. “Why should you care? You’re—”

“A monkey, huh? Born in a zoo and raised in a lab and pumped full of drugs for your service, huh?”

Iris felt her blood turn cold. “I didn’t mean anything like that.”

“I don’t care what you meant.” Chip forced two rippling streams of smoke out of his nostrils as his molars continued to pump along like a piston engine. “Lots of people have been screwed over by all this. They said it was an accident, some freak wire crossing or something. And all this time, it was some disgruntled wacko. Why are they hiding it? Wouldn’t it look better for them if it was a wacko? Don’t you think people deserve to know? Whether they believe it or not, they deserve to know why they got sent back here. Why they’re living in huts and making two bucks for Solon Superchargers.”

Iris had never heard Chip ask this many questions in her life. What did people deserve to know about this? She thought about true believers, and she thought about what Variousness Whitt might believe in. She had searched the cramped recesses of his eyes for faith, for insight, and she’d come away gasping for air.

“Chip . . . Solon didn’t have anything to do with it. Solon doesn’t own Mideast—”

“Why do you care?” Chip shrieked, whipping his head to her as one cigarette fell out of his mouth.

 As Iris looked into his eyes and came to grips with their pulsing wetness, their irritated redness totally at odds with the tufts of hair on his brow, and the way his narrow shoulders twitched and jerked and betrayed that he wasn’t used to living outside a cage even after all this time, she came to know him. She wondered maybe if she shouldn’t turn the recorder on and ask Chip for his #ReturnStory. She would start a new Employee Series for the benefit of all, be recognized for her acts of service and dedication to Solon’s Story Department, receive a promotion, earn a ten-percent increase in pay.

 Instead, she fell silent as they cruised all the way back to the refurbished hangar where they slept in rented rooms. At the very moment that she came to know Chip, she learned that he would never tell his story to Solon, and maybe never to her.

* * *

Amid the floating fragments of the Mideast Space Station’s rebuild, a low-scatter ion screen projected itself across the dark nothing of low-orbit space. As construction workers in padded orange suits cold-welded beams together, ads flashed by for DeWalt, Microsoft, Aquafresh, Podd, Tesla, and then there was Solon Superchargers, promoting their #ReturnStories. The screen’s yellowish light gleamed onto the suits of every worker, but down on Earth a thousand miles below them, not a blip could be seen. In the ad, smiling faces with worn skin and gentle eyes filled up a triangular prism, next to a thin neutral font, which read, “Solon Superchargers: For all of us.”

“You see the latest one they posted?” one of the work-a-day astronauts asked another. “It’s pretty crazy.”

“I don’t go for that stuff,” their companion answered, setting coolant against the rim of a steel tube. “What do stories do anymore?”